Adding Rupee Symbol into a Lotus Notes Document

Notes, as we know it, is a platform rather than a specific application. That, in itself, adds to the complexity to the Notes Client. When I ask people what Notes Client is, they say it’s Mail, Calendar, and bunch of other Databases. But really if you combine it all, it’s a platform, on which applications like Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Discussion Database are built. I will try to elaborate more in my blog in the coming Months. And show the power of this which can be exploited by everyone. I would like to start off my blog showing a simple and very useful add-on to the Notes Client.

Every Indian is excited and proud to have a symbol for the Indian Currency, which is “Rupee”. Until now, there was no symbol, and most people used to write “Rs” before the amount. Well, thanks to the government and IIT professor, we now have a new symbol which people can use when referring to Rupees. This is

Now, until we have a FONT which includes this character and the keystrokes assigned to it, and then getting those fonts downloaded on each windows machine, we are stuck with trying to find ways on how we can add this to our documents. Given Notes’s programming model and ease of adding a new extension, I just created a simple “add-in:, which once installed into your Notes Client, will allow you to add the Rupee Symbol within any Document. Here are the steps to do this:

Copy the ZIP file from here -> Add Rupee Notes Add-in , and UNZIP the contents into your Notes Install Directory (if you don’t know what this is, right-click on your Notes Client launch icon on your desktop, and select “Properties” which will tell you where the program is coming from. )

Edit your “notes.ini” file (this is also typically in your Notes Install Directory). You can use “Notepad” to edit it.

Search for “addinmenus” in this file.

If the line exists, add “,addrupee.dll” to the end of this line

If the line does NOT exist, add “addinmenus=addrupee.dll” line at the end of “notes.ini” file and hit ENTER

That’s it. Once this is done, exit out of Notes and re-enter. Now in any document in a rich-text field (like the Body of your memo you are creating), click on “Action” menu and you will have a new menu option called “Add Rupee Symbol”.